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On the night of August 2, 1944, Nazis murdered 2,897 men, women and children from the so-called gypsy family camp of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. They were the last remaining deportees in the camp. Altogether some 500,000 Roma and Sinti fell victim to the National Socialist policy of extermination in Europe. August 2 marks...

The International Tracing Service (ITS) and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) are jointly offering a three-day research seminar in Bad Arolsen. Interested students and doctoral candidates are invited to apply for...

The sisters Nicole van Winkoop-Schleicher and Monique Buitenhuis-Schleicher never knew their grandfather Johan Pieter Mackenbach. All the more surprised were they when, in March 2017, they received a message from the Dutchwoman Annelies Sijtsma-Hoezen on Facebook: “The Online Archive of the International Tracing...

Didier Vignolles visited the International Tracing Service (ITS) to see the original documents from Buchenwald concentration camp regarding the fate of his great-grandfather Guillaume Carles. Guillaume Carles was arrested with two comrades in early 1943 because they had established a secret cell of the Communist Party...

Czesław Bilnik from Zawiercie in Poland was imprisoned in the Gross-Rosen and Neuengamme concentration camps. Just days before the war ended in May 1945, he died in the tragic sinking of the CAP ARCONA in the Bay of Lübeck. Seventy-two years later, with the aid of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), his...

In July 2017, the historian, curator and former director of the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, founder of the Dutch National Holocaust Museum Joël J. Cahen visited the International Tracing Service (ITS) to learn about its current activities and the progress of its archive digitalization process. His assessment was...

Danny and Nurit Kononowicz from Israel visited the ITS with a long list of names, since many of Nurit’s family members had been deported from the Yugoslavian city of Novi Sad by the Gestapo starting in 1942. The fates of four of them are documented in the ITS archive.

In July 1936, the Nazis established the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. It was one of the first concentration camps and also served the Nazis as a training site for camp commandants and guards. In its early years, the camp primarily held political opponents of the regime. Between 1936...

The French politician, publicist and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil died on June 30, 2017, at the age of 89. Throughout her life, she fought against forgetting the Holocaust and for a unified Europe. “As the prerequisite for a free future, reconciled Europe needs a lasting foundation based on two pillars: passing on...

The 80th meeting of the International Commission for the International Tracing Service (IC/ITS) was held in Luxembourg and included presentations and a roundtable discussion on the development of the ITS and its future plans. This was prompted by the upcoming ten-year anniversary of the opening of the archive for...